Language Aesthetics Quotes

I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language

The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. ... Obscenity is too valuable a commodity to chuck around all over the place; it should be taken out of the safe on special occasions only.

Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

Every word has its fragrance: there is a harmony and a disharmony of fragrances, and hence of words.

After I'd been in college for a couple years I'd read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I'd come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn't seem to make the effort.

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

German has always felt the language that I come back to. It's given a very hard time by most people for being ugly and guttural. In fact, it's one of the most melodic, lyrical languages around. And German literature is amazing. It's just a treasury for me.

I pay a lot of attention to whitespace. I pay a lot of attention to the rhythm of words together.

German accents and Hassidic accents aren't that romantic. They're more harsh. Although Hebrew, when spoken by certain people, sounds beautiful. There's this beautiful woman I know who speaks Hebrew, and when she speaks, it's so attractive. Maybe it's who's speaking it.

I think speaking English is beautiful.

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful - many more.